


red, green, blue

by heixicanadragon



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mentions of Cancer, POV Character of Color, Suicidal Ideation, romance if you squint REALLY hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-07
Updated: 2013-10-07
Packaged: 2017-12-28 17:23:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/994578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heixicanadragon/pseuds/heixicanadragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She hadn’t known how shocking it was to lose something precious...</p>
            </blockquote>





	red, green, blue

__________________

tw: death, cancer, suicidal ideation, self-harm

__________________ 

She hadn’t known how shocking it was to lose something precious, and 5 seconds later have it unexpectedly restored back to her. 

_[He’s alive. Awake. He’s talking to me.]_

She wants to sing, but she can’t make a word out, in Japanese, English. In any language. Her throat clogs and she can only smile at him, can only look at him smiling back at her.

Mako helps him completely out of the pod, and once he’s kneeling before her, she embraces Raleigh on the raft, so grateful to find him breathing, giddy with the adrenaline of escaping death, the close of their battle sinking into her bones. She feels tired, raw as a snapped branch. His head is resting against hers. She can feel his chilled forehead slowly warming under hers, and her breastbone burns, so full of joy that she’s about to float away, like an old weight gone, like a kite without a string… He is alive… she is alive… they could float on the waves and up up into the blue expanse together…

Everything around her is blue, black, green, colors melding together, like a place in flesh that’s been bruised, tender and healing. The raft rocks, shifts over the ever shifting sea, and she begins to feel nauseated, green. Goosebumps rise on her neck.

She feels her core shiver. Her hair is wet, sticky with sweat and salt and sea, and the ocean wind is whipping it around her head as she snuggles into Raleigh’s armored shoulder, his arms wrapping around her, cradling her, and she begins clinging to him, wondering why he suddenly seems like the only thing left in the world. Like he’s the only thing she has.

A bigger swell of wave rocks them, splashes against their slick armor, soaking their spandex undersuits. Her thighs and belly shiver, freeze. Her knees slide under her weight on the slick hatch of the escape pod. She hears choppers circling above her, shuts her eyes as the ladder clangs against their raft before sliding into the water

—hears in the choppers’ vibrating blades an echoing low rumble of a chuckle, as Sensei sitting aft of her looks over his shoulder with crinkled eyes in a shared joke, before snapping back with squared shoulders, strong neck swinging his head sharply forward—

the ice in her belly slashes upward as her heart suddenly collapses. Raleigh is getting up to his feet, pulling at her, and she feels his tugs at her arms but her legs won’t move, and she looks up to a blur of black, blond, blue and hears someone heaving wracking sobs, but she can’t tell who it is, or understand over the pounding blood in her ears what Raleigh’s saying —

Mako can’t hear—

—

_"Mako! Listen to me!"_

—

She’s no stranger to the slow wait of a dreaded event.

Mako is in the medcenter for post-mission treatment for several days. They tell her that both she and Raleigh suffered a dangerous combination of oxygen deprivation and neural overload in combat, although thanks to Raleigh’s intervention, she has fewer side effects than he does, and it’s amazing that they’re in the shape they are. The huge  _baka_   _[Such a fool. MY fool.]_  endangered his own life by giving her his oxygen before ejecting her to safety and blowing up her jaeger.  _[MY jaeger. My poor jaeger.]_  She pushes away the thought of any other jaegers that are gone now. Whenever visitors speak of other jaegers, other crews, in a gentle tone that betrays their pity, she closes her eyes and pretends to sleep. Alone, she chants under her breath that at least her crew isn’t… that her crew is safe. He’s right there across the room, lying propped up in the hospital bed, sleeping the heavy sleep of the just.  

The brain fog and exhaustion of post-drift-combat syndrome begins to burn away.  At night when she can’t keep herself still any longer while wrapped around Raleigh’s sleep-addled form, she shuffles in slippers around the Shatterdome’s hospital corridors dragging her IV stand, trying to avoid meeting any instructions to go back to bed and “get some rest,  _haohao xiuxi.”_  The medcenter corridors are small, cramped, and circular, low lit at night by buzzing yellow panels, and the memories of that final mission are always a blurry step behind her, shrouded in red or outlined in hazy blue. Before darkness had clouded her brain with sleep, that final sleep she had welcomed, she vaguely remembered hearing Raleigh say something about falling  _[that someone could fall?]_. It hadn’t meant anything to her then, but it strikes her as appropriate now. She’s been in a free fall ever since Sensei had reluctantly and officially broken the news to her that what had taken Tamsin-oba-chan would eventually take him too. 

The night her traitorous brain whispers  _[The cancer couldn’t even take its course,]_  she kicks the wall hard enough to break a toe and her yell sends the night staff running to see what was the matter. They add a night nurse to supervise their room and Mako takes to limping around during daylight concentrating on the pain in her foot, and at night quietly lying on her back with wet cheeks waiting to lose consciousness.

When Mako is released, Raleigh is still having trouble remembering things and remains confined to his room and on a steady drip. He says he’s constantly thirsty, asking for glasses of water from anyone who passes by, forgetting that he’s already asked at least four other people that hour, and because they’re both heroes and he’s charmed the entire staff, at least five steaming paper cups usually stand on his bed tray at any given moment. He’s in a perpetual sheepish daze, and she can’t bear to leave him when he’s still like this. The doctors don’t push the issue of reassigning her hospital bed (there’s not many new patients coming into the medcenter anymore). She recites the nurses’ promises that these are just temporary side effects to the damage he sustained and that he’s quickly improving. 

She’s thankful that he hasn’t improved enough to have had the inclination to talk about the mission yet. 

She still sneaks into his bed at night, by now his arms automatically folding around her even in sleep. Almost every night he wakes up to her shaking from a nightmare or violently weeping. He just holds her, mumbling English that she can just catch. It sounds all wrong. His lips are muffled in her hair, barely mouthing consonants and slurring vowels way too much, nothing like what she wants to hear. He’s fumbled into Japanese, activating an memory of her Sensei, younger and less fluent and tremblingly reassuring her, when she has to bark a pained laugh, fading away into sleep under his crooning “ _daijōbu, daijōbu, sore wa daijōbu ni narudarou_.”

—

_"You can finish this!"_

—

Mako stalks to work. She holds herself like a board, sitting erect, feet planted firmly under the long tables at news conferences, listening to bureaucrats shamelessly take credit for something they did not do and brazenly claiming tenacity, endurance, and pride for countries that had turned their backs on the program that the Marshall had somehow kept running on a shoestring budget.

She knows that the Marshall detonated that bomb to clear the path for her jaeger save the whole world, not just those who deserve it, but her gut roils in disbelief and hate that these assholes are alive and he is not.

If she pretends that she is walking in harness within a nuclear powered metal suit towards monsters from another dimension to slug them with an elbow-rocket-powered punch, she can make it across the room to shake yet another politician’s hand and accept their thanks for saving the world, and can listen with no change in expression to their condolences. She realizes after the fact that her gaze is icy and her jaw is tight, her impression with the media worsening with each publicity stunt. Raleigh is always by her side, and she begins to step behind him, let him answer the personal questions, so she can turn on her brightest smile or her solemnest thoughtfulness and hold his arm, using his open face and honest expression to deflect interviewers. 

She knows she’s hiding. She’s afraid of what she would do if she didn’t.

The Shatterdome is now a shell of its former self. If she could do it without repercussions, she’d physically shake down with a quarter-staff every world leader for cash to repay the debt they owe her, to keep the PPDC running forever, stalking the ocean on constant patrol, so that all those who died would not have died in vain. In the event of another Breach forming, she would be able to defend any further stabs at colonization starting by those monsters who tore down her life and smashed the foundations. She wishes that the kaiju  _would._  She wants to disembowel an alien and scatter its brain matter to the four winds for every time that Sensei’s brain had ever bled from his nose or blanked in a fugue of battle memory.

In her room, above where she previously kept her drafting table, a sandbag hangs in the corner. Sometimes Raleigh comes galloping in to see her, under pretense of errand but really because he’s worried about her  _[and the horrible fool is still drift-compatible, still picks up on emotions, sometimes across the Dome, and he STILL has no respect for privacy]_ , and slides to a stop on the sand that litters the entire floor. She stands next to the bag as it lazily spins, leaking a stream from a tear in its side, her clenched fists raw and bleeding where granules aren’t caked inside. Sometimes he chastises her for forgetting to wrap up, “You’re going to ruin your hands AND your bag that way,” puttering around looking for her gloves, and she mutters that she couldn’t find them today as she trudges towards the bed. 

Sometimes the red haze before her eyes doesn’t clear in time before she pounds into him as an intruder, with no mercy, no thought of pulling punches.  

He’s taken it in the past, barely blocking and suffering blows to the ribs and near blows to nose and kidneys, but today he snaps his limbs up as sharply as the Marshall could pull a military parade stance and the resemblance blossoms in her heart like a raging fire and all pretense of control is reduced to ash—

He leaves for Alaska the next day, bloodied like a steak. Mako’s ears are ringing with the words she screamed at him. “[Why didn’t you let me die with him!]”

—

…

—

Mako realizes that six months have gone by, lost to numbness, when Tendo and Alison knock on the door to her tiny apartment a few blocks away from the Bone Slums.

They invite her to move in with them. Tendo can get her some freelance programming and design work through his new job if she wants. Alison takes one look at the rooms and smoothes her tightly curled hair under a handkerchief and begins directing both Tendo and Mako’s cleaning efforts.

Mako feels her bones ache with unaccustomed movement and sees the floor for the first time in two months.

She cries in Alison’s arms when they find the Marshall’s picture under the fridge.

—

_"I’ll always be there for you!"_

—

On a day that is definitely not the anniversary of K-Day, the destruction of Tokyo, or K-V-Day, Mako moves into a suburb outside Tokyo. She’s a bus ride away from the nearest subway into the city, a bus ride away from the train into the countryside, and in walking distance from three different parks and playgrounds. She doesn’t see herself driving a vehicle ever again, but she wants to be able to travel a little when she feels like it. 

When she’s not working with the robotics design firm from her home office, she stays outside a lot. There are a lot of benches to sit on. Young families walk by with dogs and children in tow, and she feels like she can’t stop grinning. She thinks she could start a garden in the plot behind her apartment tower, but there’s apparently a mole problem and the neighbors all say that if you want to keep any vegetables alive, grow them on your balcony.

She travels into Tokyo one weekend to see the results of the reconstruction efforts, sliding to the back of a subway car so she can cry on the way there without much fuss. She hasn’t been back in over a decade and a half. Both she and Sensei had agreed that returning too soon to the scene of a previous battle wasn’t wise. She winces. That first Drift with Raleigh had still been too soon, for both of them. But they had done it somehow and not blown up the Dome, and drifted in combat twice more together after that, fighting to stay in the silence of the Drift and out of a Tokyo long-gone and away from Alaska’s Miracle Mile zone for both of their sakes. For the sake of the world. 

She walks down the sidewalk of a wide street, shopping malls and office buildings towering above her, people crowding around food stands, strangers streaming past her with not a second glance. Mako’s not recognizable anymore, not as Tokyo’s Daughter, the Iconic Survivor, and not as Savior of the World, Kaiju-Killer, Jaeger Restorer, Heartbreaker. She hasn’t cut her hair since before… the first K-V-Day, and her blue tips have completely faded into bleached yellow behind what used to be her fringe, swept over her shoulder and down her back. She knows that beyond Tendo and Alison and their two children, and Herc (whom she calls in Perth about once a month), there isn’t anyone who would recognize her now. She doesn’t know where Raleigh is, anymore. He was always good at disappearing.

And apparently Mako is the best at being dangerous. Or was.

She avoids looking down any of the alley ways, although she proudly wears a new pair of red sneakers.

—

_"You can always find me in the drift!"_

—

She hadn’t known how shocking it was to lose something precious, and 5 years later have it unexpectedly restored back to her. 

After the surreal email exchange, the phone call to get her address leaves her cold in disbelief for a week.

When Raleigh shows up in the park at dusk, bag slung over his shoulder and jacket flapping in the summer breeze, she for a moment can’t remember if anything has happened at all since that first day, except for the ache in her heart when she realizes the Marshall hadn’t first stepped out of a chopper into the rain without an umbrella this time.

She’s still sitting on the bench, holding an ice-cream in one hand and a tablet in the other, and he walks forward until he’s just outside her combat striking range.

They stare at each other, searching each other’s faces, until he finally breaks the silence.

"[You’re different than what I imagined… That is to say—]"

She bursts out laughing, and can’t stop for several minutes.

"You’ll look better once I take care of that beard," she finally chuckles. She stands up, crosses the space between them, and hands him her half-eaten cone. He takes it in one hand, his gaze never leaving her face, a goofy grin crossing his.

She smiles, nods her head in the direction of the neighborhood and walks forward, hearing his familiar rolling tread behind her. Before her, the echo of a sharper, brisker footstep and the warmth of the heart it carried draws her home.


End file.
